Libya: Illustrious corpses—the truth is always revolutionary

by Toni Solo

September 28, 2011

September
25th 2011

Right now in Libya the UN
recognized government and its NATO masters are bombing
hundreds of civilians to death in Sirte, Bani Walid and
Sabha. They have bombed schools and hospitals and murdered
whole families. This infamy was sanctioned by the UN from
the beginning and has been justified by many of the cream of
international progressive intellectuals. It is long past
time to identify and condemn these accomplices to the crimes
against humanity in Libya committed by the Western elites
and their puppet governments.

The colonial war against
Libya has defined more sharply than ever the structures of
knowledge, attitudes and behaviour that characterize
progressive and radical intellectual production in Europe
and North America. The war has thrown that production into
crisis. It could not be clearer now that the class function
of intellectual managers like Gilbert Achcar, Immanuel
Wallerstein, Ignacio Ramonet and similar individuals is to
neuter effective protest against corporate capitalism and
imperialism.

The crypto-fascist Irish poet W.B.Yeats once
wrote, "Did that play of mine send out certain men the
English shot?" Intellectual managers like Achar, Ramonet
and Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and
Santiago Alba Rico might ask themselves, "Did our work
prepare the vicious NATO genocide in Libya?" Of course,
the answer is "yes, it did". They also seem to think
that reality is perfectly all right.

They avow they seek
radical social change and revolution in theory. But wherever
processes have achieved genuine social change in the real
world, as in the Libyan Jamahiriya, they attack them or, as
in Venezuela, seek to mould them to their own narcissistic
criteria. If one looks at the expressions of dissent
privileged under corporate consumer capitalism they are all
varieties of anarchism.

Of course they are. Anarchist
anti-communism is a spoilt child doted on and nurtured by
the capitalist elites– a nuisance, but a useful one and
very much part of the laissez-faire family. Capitalism
easily accommodates and co-opts fatuous slogans like
"Another world is possible". We can see what world they
have in mind by looking at Libya. The intellectuals who
supported the murderous racist Libyan renegades and NATO's
contract putsch-insurrection are a good example of how the
process of co-optation and accommodation works.

They
assimilate themselves into the rituals and processes of
public life in the plutocracies of North America and Europe.
They shift between academic life, non-governmental activity
and participation in the mass corporate psy-warfare media
and their alternative counterparts, the gatekeepers of
permissible dissent. Libya has finally brought this reality
out into the open in the most categorical way. One has only
to look back at what influential intellectual managers
produced around the time of the March 19th UN Resolution
1973.

"The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s
analysis is that there is not going to be any significant
military involvement of the western world in Libya. The
public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress
local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council
resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There
will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others
won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi
stance is meeting resistance within France."

"Under such circumstances, any other reasonable
leader would have understood that the time to negotiate and
give up power had arrived. But not Colonel Gadafi. At the
risk of submerging his country in a civil war, the
"Guide", in power for 42 years, explained that the
demonstrators were "youngsters Al Qaeda had drugged by
adding hallucinogenic pills to their Nescafé". And he
ordered the armed forces to repress the protests with heavy
gunfire and extreme force. The Al Jazeera channel showed
military planes strafing civilian
demonstrators."

and

"One can be against the
current structure of the United Nations, or reckon that its
operations leave much to be desired. Or that the Western
powers dominate the organization. These are acceptable
criticisms. But for the moment the UN constitutes the only
source of international law. In that sense, and contrary to
the wars wars in Kosovo or Iraq which were never sanctioned
by the UN, the current intervention in Libya is legal,
according to international law; legitimate according to the
principles of solidarity among democrats; and desirable for
the international community which brings together people
struggling for their liberty."

"The idea that Western powers are intervening in
Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their
interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is the
idea that what they are after is laying their hands on
Libyan oil. In fact, the whole range of Western oil and gas
companies is active in Libya: Italy's ENI, Germany's
Wintershall, Britain's BP, France's Total and GDF Suez, US
companies ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Occidental,
British-Dutch Shell, Spain's Repsol, Canada's Suncor,
Norway's Statoil, etc. Why then are Western powers
intervening in Libya today, and not in Rwanda yesterday and
Congo yesterday and today? As one of those who have
energetically argued that the invasion of Iraq was "about
oil" against those who tried to outsmart us by saying that
we were "reductionists," don't expect me to argue that this
one is not about oil. It definitely is. But how?

My
take on that is the following. After watching for a few
weeks Gaddafi conducting his terribly brutal and bloody
suppression of the uprising that started in mid-February --
estimates of the number of people killed in early March
ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the
International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition's
estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000 -- Western
governments, like everybody else for that matter, became
convinced that with Gaddafi set on a counter-revolutionary
offensive and reaching the outskirts of Libya's second
largest city of Benghazi (over 600,000 inhabitants), a
mass-scale slaughter was imminent."

Counterfactual
perception management

One could quote many more
examples of the intellectual dishonesty, ignorance,
stupidity, arrogance and cynicism of these prestigious
writers and others like, for example, Santiago Alba Rico,
Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and Samir Amin. But the extra
bulk of documentation would add nothing to the overall
picture of narcissistic collaboration with the dominant NATO
corporate psy-warfare machine. Nor is it worth dallying over
the role of NATO's favourite gatekeepers of permissible
dissent like Counterpunch, ZNet, Rebelión and other similar
alternative information web sites.

Those sites did their
job of muting and censoring effective discussion and
argument at crucial moments prior to the March 19th vote in
the UN Security Council and around the decisive event of
NATO's ground invasion of Tripoli in August. A tiny handful
of writers, among them John Pilger and Tariq Ali, spoke out
against the war. But even they still swallowed hook, line
and sinker the NATO psy-warfare caricature of Muammar Al
Ghaddafi as a blood-on-his-hands dictator-clown.

While the
individual errors of Achcar, Wallerstein and Ramonet may
vary, all of them start from the central premise of NATO's
psychological warfare offensive, namely, that Libya was a
dictatorship overthrown by a popular revolution. As part of
their suspiciously coherent perception management of events
in Libya, all these NATO psy-warfare collaborators omit the
following facts:

• prior to March 19th the Libyan
Jamahiriya had called for negotiations and a UN fact-finding
mission - rejected both by the renegades and the dominant
powers in the UN;• the only reliably confirmed
information about events in Libya between February 17th and
March 19th came from the Libyan government the Libyan
government's account was confirmed by testimony from both
Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Chief of Staff Admiral
Michael Mullen as well as by Russian military intelligence
prior to the March 19th Resolution 1973. • there was
never any reliable evidence of the Libyan Jamahiriya bombing
or machine gunning peaceful demonstrations in February or
March;• on the other hand credible accounts of racist
pogroms and lynchings by the Libyan renegades were available
from the very start of the events in Benghazi in February
;• the African Union's constant insistence from the
very start of the conflict on a negotiated peace was
welcomed by the Libyan Jamihiriya;• the devastating
role played by international sanctions imposed on the basis
of the flagrant fabrication of Libyan involvement in the
Lockerbie terrorist atrocity badly affected Libya's
development between 1992 and 2003;• by 2011 Libya's
population enjoyed an unparalleled high standard of living
relative to the rest of Africa;• US$200bn in funds
were saved by the Libyan Jamahiriya and administered for the
benefit of the Libyan people and impoverished African
countries;• the Libyan Jamahiriya promoted innumerable
significant and strategic development initiatives in other
African countries;• prior to their NATO supported
putsch- insurrection, the currrent renegade leaders promoted
corporate friendly Western neoliberal policies that were
firmly resisted by Muammar Al Ghaddafi• once they
realized Maummar Al Ghadafi was resisting deepening
neoliberal reforms, NATO planned and carried out the
Southern Mistral war game in which they practised a military
assault against Libya

Analysis with feet of
clay

One could go on delving into more detail to rebut
all the false claims and hypocritical assertions made by
NATO psy-warfare fellow travellers like Ramonet, Achcar and
Wallerstein. But it is enough to look at the excerpts quoted
above to see how skewed, disingenuous, arrogant, cynical and
downright baseless their arguments are. These are classic
characteristics of NATO country perception management
against targets from the Cuban revolution to the UN
supported coups in Haiti and the Ivory Coast

Immanuel
Wallerstein completely failed to predict the course of
events in Libya in the most abject and ridiculous way. The
UN Security Council did pass a resolution. NATO did resolve
to go to war. President Sarkozy easily secured his country's
approval for French armed forces to participate in NATO's
colonial war.

Wallerstein demonstrated complete idiocy in
his appraisal of events in March 2011. We can add his
illustrious corpse to the Ship of Fools adrift over Libya
full to the gunwales with NATO dupes who got things
completely wrong on Libya. Wallerstein's fatuous patronising
arrogance duped him into hopeless error. By contrast, the
appraisal of the facts by Fidel Castro and President Hugo
Chavez was absolutely right.

The falsehoods of Ignacio
Ramonet

Ignacio Ramonet completely misrepresented the
nature of the events in February in Benghazi. No reliable
evidence indicates that peaceful demonstrators were fired
on. At the time, the Libyan government's account was
confirmed by testimony from both US Defence Secretary Robert
Gates and the US armed forces Chief of Staff Admiral Michael
Mullen, as well as by Russian military intelligence prior to
the March 19th Resolution 1973. Now the highest estimates of
deaths as a result of the armed insurrection in Libya
between February 17th and March 19th are around 250.

Ramonet got things wrong because he took as his source a
notorious NATO propaganda outlet, the UK Guardian newspaper.
The Guardian's foreign news coverage is at least as cynical
and skewed as that of El País or Le Monde. Ramonet also
relied on the Qatar dominated Al Jazeera, now overwhelmingly
staffed by staff who previously worked with NATO country
mainstream corporate media.

It is not as strange as it
seems that a supposed radical like Ignacio Ramonet should
ignore the entire history of imperialist interventions over
the last 200 years. At one time Ramonet was extremely proud
of his work promoting the World Social Forum. That body is
thoroughly compromised by its links to corporate
funders.

On Libya, Ramonet also dishonestly suggests as a
fact something he most certainly does not know, namely that
Muammar al Ghaddafi ordered the use of extreme force against
peaceful demonstrators. That suggestion is pure propaganda
as is his selective quote of Muammar al Ghaddafi's comments
at the time.. To write as Ignacio Ramonet then did, that UN
Resolution 1973 was legal, legitimate and desirable, takes
self-serving cynicism to its very extremes.

Former US
Defence Secretary Robert Gates had already pointed out
correctly that enforcing a no fly zone necessarily involved
military aggression. But the UN Charter specifically rules
out military action except in self-defence. Hence President
Obama's counterfactual statement that the United States is
not at war against Libya. So much for United Nations
legality.

In any case, Resolution 1973 calls for a
peaceful negotiated solution. That option proposed by the
Libyan government and the African Union and by Latin
America's ALBA bloc of countries had already been rejected
by the Libyan renegades. They rejected negotiations on the
strength of the support they were getting from the very
governments who cynically passed the Resolution knowing
neither they themselves nor the renegades had any intention
of seeking a peaceful settlement.

Ramonet argues that the
UN blank cheque for intervention was legitimate in terms of
democratic solidarity. Here we come up against a fundamental
contradiction of the international neocolonial Left. Igancio
Ramonet, a famous critic of corporate capitalism, tacitly
accepts, after all, that North America and Europe are
composed of democracies and he explicitly describes the
Libyan Jamahiriya as a dictatorship.

But it is the Libyan
Jamahiriya that carefully saved and invested hundreds of
billions of dollars which it then used very clearly for the
benefit of the Libyan people and other African peoples. On
the other hand, it is the rotten-corrupt plutocracies of
Europe and North America that have sucked dry their peoples
so as to enrich a tiny corporate elite of crooked bankers
and speculators and to protect their criminal financial
system. The democratic solidarity Ramonet is talking about
is no more than a narcissistic construct conjured up to
justify his ideological prejudice against the Libyan
Jamahiriya.

To conclude, as Ignacio Ramonet then does,
that the UN Resolution 1973 was in any way desirable is
plainly disingenuous folly. The terms of Resolution 1973
left matters wide open to whatever interpretation the North
American and European governments concerned chose to put on
it. No serious observer expected anything less than the
ruthless application of force to support the racist
putsch-insurrection struggling for existence in
Benghazi.

That putsch-insurrection completely lacked
popular support in the rest of Libya. Like Achcar and
Wallerstein, Ramonet ignored plenty of readily available
information that indicated those very facts which have been
confirmed over and over again since March 19th 2011.
Ramonet's reputation is one more illustrious corpse in the
Ship of Fools illuminated by the flames of NATO's genocide
in Zliten, Tripoli, Sirte and Bani Walid.

Gilbert
Achcar – psy-warfare operative

Gilbert Achcar's is
perhaps the most egregiously dishonest and overt case of
collabroation in NATO's psychological warfare against the
Libyan people. With regard to Libya, Immanuel Wallerstein
turned out to be a dunderhead and Ignacio Ramonet, more than
anything, a narcissistic disingenuous buffoon. But Gilbert
Achcar's position is one carefully politically calculated in
the most absolute bad faith.

Achcar is Professor of
Development Studies and International Relations at Britain's
Foreign and Colonial Office's extra-mural School of Oriental
and African Studies. He has taught in France and Britain for
over 30 years now. Only the most naive would believe Achcar
has not been utterly co-opted by his environment. His
remarks on Libya demonstrate his moral and intellectual
capitulation as a colonialist apologist to a fault.

"The idea that Western powers are intervening in
Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their
interests is just preposterous." It is very rare for a
NATO psy-warfare operative to out themselves like this.
Self-evidently, it is Gilbert Achcar's view that is truly
preposterous, suggesting the Western regimes intervening in
Libya have done so for any other reason than that the Libyan
Jamahiriya blocked their plans on several fronts.

Achcar
continues to out himself as a NATO apologist by shamelessly
citing as categorical fact the most extreme and ridiculous
figures of civilian deaths at the hands of the forces of the
Libyan Jamahiriya with absolutely no basis in any legitimate
reporting or investigation. "Estimates of the number of
people killed in early March ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the
latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the
Libyan opposition's estimates ranging between 6,000 and
8,000."

Only a NATO stooge would expect to be taken
seriously when citing the International Criminal Court as a
reliable source. As it turns out, the ICC on this matter has
been completely discredited, along with its other ridiculous
lie about allegations of mass rape by Libyan army troops on
Viagra. The illustrious corpse of the ICC's Luis Moreno
Campo's reputation, or its desiccated remains, joins those
of Wallerstein, Ramonet and Achcar and their accomplices in
the NATO fellow-travellers funeral Barge-of-Fools going up
in flames in the sands of Libya.

The facts now
established and accepted by all but NATO collaborators like
Gilbert Achcar are that the Libyan security forces did not
fire on unarmed demonstrators. Respected human rights
organizations put the number of fatalities as a result of
the armed insurrection between February 17th and March 19th
at around 250. So it was extremely unlikely that Achcar's
scare of "mass-scale slaughter" was in any way likely,
especially since the Libyan authorities were offering to
negotiate. What is indeed absolutely clear is that Achcar is
a fully committed psy-warfare operative in NATO's war
against Libya and everyone who expresses solidarity with the
Libyan Jamahiriya.

Intellectuals and
counterintelligence

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the
CIA and its fellow intelligence agencies invested a great
deal of money and resources suborning intellectuals in
Europe and in North America. The story of Encounter magazine
and the career of the poet Stephen Spender in Britain is
emblematic. Other examples abound. It would be extremely
foolish to think the same practices have not persisted and
become more sophisticated into the present day.

An
example of the way the counter-intelligence network of
outright NATO collaborators and fellow travellers works has
come to light in relation to Libya. One of the gatekeepers
of permissible dissent, the Spanish web site Rebelión,
prominently featured an article by Santiago Alba Rico. Like
Achcar, Alba Rico is a prominent academic, a specialist on
the Arab world in the best traditions of Orientalism. Alba
Rico demonstrates that Edward Said's critical concept of
Orientalism can readily involute upon itself for the
purposes of neocolonial propaganda.

In the course of his
article Alba Rico writes of the situation's complexity only
to drastically simplify it in favour of his point of view.
"Even Nato is aware of this complexity as is demonstrated
by the fact – as Gilbert Achcar has pointed out – that
Libya has been bombed very little, with the aim of
lengthening the war and trying to achieve the defeat of the
regime without truly breaking with it." One pictures
Achcar and Alba Rico in places like Zliten, or Sirte telling
the mourning relatives of dead NATO victims there to stop
crying, "After all, you've only been bombed a
little..."

Only a shameless apologist for NATO would
attempt to allege that Libya has been bombed "very
little". On cue, Alba Rico seizes on this and uses
Achcar's grotesque cynical falsehood to pad out his own
apology for the colonialist onslaught against the Libyan
Jamahiriya. At this point, it is possible to move on from
the lies and hypocrisies of these NATO collaborators and
fellow travellers and look at their claims for their own
intellectual and ethical standards.

One useful source of
information about what has really been going on in Libya
beyond NATO psy-warfare disinformation reports has been
Leonor Massanet. Someone who worked with Rebelión until
very recently has confirmed that Santiago Alba Rico engaged
in deliberate behind-the-scenes character assassination of
Leonor Massanet. Alba Rico's aim, in which to some extent he
clearly succeeded, was to discredit Leonor because her
plausible and credible account of events in Libya
contradicted his own thoroughly false analysis.

When one
comes across cases of people being turned into non-persons
or being calumnied in this way, one is at the limits of
legitimate intellectual disagreement. Beyond that frontier
one, is then dealing with the abuse of power for
counter-intelligence purposes to neutralize effective
dissent. Right now, the whole world is a vast mess of
low-intensity conflict and outright war. The Western elites
are determined to dominate the world's peoples and their
natural resources. The activities of NATO fellow-travellers
like Gilbert Achcar and Santiago Alba Rico are far from
innocent or coincidental.

Here we are faced with the
reality of the thorough hypocrisy of the co-opted
alternative news and information media. All of them, whether
it's Rope-a-dope [4], Zzzz [5] or Sumisión [6] purport to deliver
reliable factual information from a variety of viewpoints.
All of them are infested with hypocritical self-regarding
phonies who readily suppress views they dislike. They all
engage in what Gilbert Achcar would term "Stalinist"
censorship and the making of non-persons. Leonor Massanet is
far from being the only victim of this pernicious deceitful
managerial counter-intelligence manipulated
culture.

Psy-warfare's next offensive :
ALBA

Psychological warfare is a vital component of
total war. All through the 1980s and 1990s the North
American and European NGO sector was systematically co-opted
by NATO country governments to serve NATO propaganda ends.
In effect, they are the soft extra-mural arm of their
countries' Foreign Ministries, and routinely project those
countries' foreign policies. That reality has been very well
documented. It is as true of the structures available to
progressive intellectual workers as it is of the NGOs that
employ progressive aid and development workers.

The
alternative media's coverage of NATO's contract
putsch-insurrection against the Libya Jamahariya has
demonstrated this with the most startling clarity. Along
with the Libyan Jamahariya, other perennial victims of their
deceit and hypocrisy have been the Sandinista Front for
National Liberation in Nicaragua, the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia as well as national Communist
Parties in general. Presumably, other people devoted to
other causes and issues will have had identical
experiences.

It is a fact that neocolonial intellectual
and cultural networks tend to dominate international
anti-imperialist intellectual production. Their members have
a vested interest in maintaining the class structure
inherent to that production, one that effectively censors
argument and maintains strictly policed parameters. The
colonial invasion of Libya has demonstrated with absolute
clarity that effective anti-imperialism – for example by
the FSLN in Nicaragua or the PSUV in Venezuela - is under
threat from both the right and the neocolonial left.

After Libya, a likely future target will be Nicaragua.
But the NATO elites view Nicaragua as simply an hors
d'oeuvre for the main course, Venezuela. The battle for
Venezuela began back in 2002 and will get more and more
fierce once President Hugo Chavez wins re-election ten years
on, in 2012. The international neocolonial Left is hard at
work sawing the floor away from under the Sandinista
revolutionary process in Nicaragua. Nor is it in any way
controversial to say they are busy trying to co-opt the
Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. Libya has shown they are
capable of any
infamy.

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